How I Dress Now: Phish's Mike Gordon

An inside look at bucking expectations and dressing like a rock star.

The name Phish doesn't call to mind style, at least not in the traditional sense.

It's understandable that the band's mere mention brings to mind a sea of dusty tie-dye and massive patchwork corduroy pants. This wookie-hippie image is harder to shake than a head full of wet dreadlocks, but the band, and to some degree their scene, is still going strong more than 30 years deep, and has undergone some transformations.

Musical evolution is inevitable with a group like Phish who, love or hate them, is overflowing with creativity and talent, but you might be surprised to see that these themes also extends to the band's appearance—and we're not just talking about < target="_blank">playing a vacuum cleaner while wearing a dress. And, with the recent embrace of Birkenstocks and Tevas, the fashion world might just be ready to meet them halfway.

With these developments on our minds, we met up with bassist Mike Gordon at Mass MOCA in North Adams, Massachusetts, where he was winding up a solo tour in support of his new album, Overstep, to get a glimpse into the surprisingly very stylish men.

It's really important for a band that's always improvising to feel comfortable on stage. And yet, we don't want to be in-our-pajamas comfortable, because getting dressed up is a sort of ritual for the occasion. If the occasion is rock star then there should be something in there that signifies that and makes us feel like that.

Getting dressed to get on stage and to do other such things is a ritual. Even a certain T-shirt would be carefully selected against another T-shirt. I went through a phase maybe 20 years ago where I was just trying to be as crazy as possible, wearing a lot of highlighter yellow and green and I had a wig that looked like my own hair that raised my hair two inches higher.

I met someone in the Grateful Dead who was interested in my list of what makes a good gig, and the last thing on the list was "you have to like your shirt." And I wasn't just kidding either, it's really important. There's so many times I'm onstage where I'm on this musical adventure and adventure of consciousness, and having this peak experience, and liking the shirt, or pants, is really part of that.

We did the Rolling Stone shoot where we were on the cover and they brought crazy stuff… Trey had no shirt and a skirt on, and this big black horn coming straight up from his head. We were kind of going with the flow, thinking, "Lets just be crazy." But we never wanted to be zany, that's kind of a bad word. To be unexpected is cool, and at a certain point we did a photo shoot where unexpected was to actually just dress up and look nice, and the stylist had brought a lot of Varvatos stuff, and we thought, "OK, well, this feels good."

Trey and I got into Varvatos and said, "Let's go get more stuff like this." We'd have these shopping sprees with a stylist and other friends to help, to the point where we were wearing so much Varvatos that we were wearing the same stuff. So hence he's wearing Rag & Bone and I'm doing G-Star, All Saints, whatever just to get away.

I wonder if sometimes the audience is a few degrees different from the band? I mean, there's a whole bunch of things that you might call "hippie" that we would never wear. Like no one in the band would ever wear tie-dye, or Birkenstocks, or… What's the long list of stuff like that? There's all kinds of things. Not even for a minute would any of us ever have worn that stuff.

The dress is still around. Yeah, that never went away. That was a ritual too. If he [Jon Fishman, drummer] didn't wear the dress it would be a bad gig. He had a three-piece suit he was wearing at one point too for a while, and those were bad gigs, and so back came the dress.

It's kind of like working with music. I make an album, and it's always a reaction to the previous one, and with fashion it's a little bit like that too. For me it's just kind of fun. I like to see how far I can stretch it away from what's expected—without being corny. Looking through pictures of David Bowie from a long time ago, there's so far you can take this that it's a shame to stop somewhere around normal.

Two summers ago I saw some picture of a guy wearing eyeliner and thought, "You know what? I'm going to try this." I got this little iPhone album called "guyliner" with pictures people sent me. It was only on occasional nights and at the big venues. You know, if there are twenty-two-thousand people, it's only the front row who can see anyway. There was mascara that was purple and I don't even know what all the other different kinds of makeup was called. They were just globbing it on.

It's symbolic, too. So much of being a musician is letting loose. It's being up there and allowing your inner child to blossom. It's not always easy for someone like me, who's kind of a subdued person, to be that crazy loose child that I once was. But lately I've been getting a lot closer to how I would like to be—no self-consciousness.

I definitely have parts of my closet where I say, "Okay this stack of pants and this stack of shirts is for stage." Occasionally when I'm in the civilian world I'll put on the stage stuff. It's not radically different, but to me, I know it's somewhat different. It's a little bit like putting on a costume or a uniform to get in the mood.

I do this fun thing where my five-year-old and (stylist/friend) Julia sit in my room, and we have a huge gong, and I go through my closet and I hold it up and they hit the gong. And out it goes. So then there's room for more stuff.

Sometimes I'll have this thing going with a new haircut and scarf or whatever and then I'll go into one of these hipster coffee shops and see someone else and say, "Oh no! We've made a carbon copy of that person, we can't do that." If it's something that someone else would wear then it really shouldn't be on me.

My single biggest anxiety dream that I have—and I've had it for decades—is I'm backstage trying to decide what to wear and the band's already on stage, adding salt to the wound, and no one is playing the bass. I look at my wardrobe and I have one pink sneaker and one orange one, and some other really horrible stuff, and that's all. I have to make these decisions between horrible choices. And it's New Years Eve and they're already playing "Auld Lang Syne" and I couldn't possibly be more late for something, but I still can't decide. I do it in real life to the point where I start to sweat and think I just have to figure this out earlier in the day… It could just be the choice between two simple T-shirts, but I freak out about it.

We got ourselves invited to a party at Prince's house. We heard it was creative formal, whatever that meant. So we went to this Italian suit shop, and within half an hour got four Italian suits, got pinned up and the whole deal. Then we got there and we learned what we thought was creative wasn't creative.

They had these hats, it was the first time I spent like $800 on a hat. It was made from vintage wicker, whatever the hell that means. But we all got 'em and went to the premiere of Old School.

I remember we had top hats once or maybe twice. We used to play at the World Trade Center in Boston, and we all had top hats and tuxedos. I remember Fishman had one that was just a G-string, a tuxedo G-string and then tails.

I think the thing that made us seem not very fashionable is we'd go on long tours, and somebody would find a T-shirt they liked and wear it every night, and that would be the end of that. All the extra fashion stuff would stay in the suitcase. But then I think as time went on a couple of us just became more conscious of it.

I really like seeing what Mick Jagger is wearing when he's not on stage. It's usually a suit, but it's a very unexpected color like bright yellow or something, as if it wasn't enough to be Mick Jagger. Does he pull that off because he's Mick Jagger, or is he Mick Jagger because he can pull that off?

I see photo shoots that are incredible, but then I wonder if it's really the way that the people look, or whether the whole thing is a set up.

David Byrne is an example where wearing the big suit seems to go along with the strangeness that's already there. Or Beck, I don't really know how to describe what his style is, but I kind of like the whole package. You can tell that someone's just thinking about what would work, and the way the music sounds, and the lighting. It's kind of an art school mentality where creativity can stem into all the departments.

It was like needing to trim everything down to square one in order to regroup and then start again. Losing weight, and hair, and color. Musically too, let's simplify. It's time to start filling in the new personality, whatever the hell it wants to be. New scarves, or hair that goes straight up—which was actually inspired by David Lynch. I'd had the same fcking haircut for 30 years or whatever, and was so particular. Then I said, "Forget all that, I can suddenly make a change." And if I can suddenly make a change with my hair, then suddenly making one with my music becomes easier.

If you look at the bobble head dolls that are sold of me in the parking lot, it goes through the whole style trajectory.

A Part of Hearst Digital Media
Esquire participates in various affiliate marketing programs, which means we may get paid commissions on editorially chosen products purchased through our links to retailer sites.